Strong As Steel

by Jon Land

  —“Lone on the Range: Texas Lawmen” by Jesse Sublett, Texas Monthly, December 31, 1969

  15

  MEXICO CITY, MEXICO

  “I haven’t been here in many years, muchachos, not since your great grandfather was murdered.”

  Luna Diaz Delgado held both her grandchildren’s hands as she led them about the Zócalo, Mexico City’s sprawling open air plaza reserved for only the most special of events.

  Because today was turning out to be very special indeed. The sun burned hot, seeming to bake the concrete and turn the plaza into an oven, but the children didn’t seem to mind, glad to have their grandmother all to themselves amid a smattering of both locals and tourists. Luna had men watching, on guard for the unexpected, but they kept their distance so as to allow for a measure of privacy and not unsettle her grandchildren.

  “This was where your great-grandfather was assassinated,” Luna told her oldest granddaughter and grandson. “A cowardly act, given it took all the cartels together to pull off, and then only barely.”

  “Were you sad?” wondered her nine-year-old grandson, Diego, taking Luna’s hand.

  “I was more angry than sad, and anger is a preferable emotion to grief any day. But you have to channel that anger. You have to learn patience.”

  Ten-year-old Isabella took the hand her brother had shed as quickly as he had grabbed it. “What does that mean?”

  “In my case, it meant laying back for many, many years. I was one of the few survivors of the massacre that took my parents’ life on the day of their wedding. I knew if I was patient, appeared weak and timid, I would have my revenge. It worked, because the cartels ignored me. They ignored me until the day I came for them, after they killed your grandfather, too.”

  “Abuela, you’re hurting me,” whined Isabella.

  Luna Diaz Delgado looked down and realized how hard she was squeezing her granddaughter’s hand. “Lo siento,” she apologized, letting it go and patting the girl’s head.

  “What did you do when you came for them?” Diego asked her.

  “I made them watch as I killed their families, their wives and children, before I killed them last. I did it myself, because I needed the satisfaction. I needed to feel whole again.”

  Diego’s mouth had dropped, his eyes moistening. “You killed their children?”

  “But not their grandchildren,” Luna comforted, which was true enough.

  “Oh,” the boy said, his tears forgotten before they began to fall.

  “You know what they called me after that? ‘La Viuda Roja.’ Do you know what that means?”

  “It’s a spider.” Diego nodded. “The red widow.”

  “Ah, the red widow isn’t just any spider. They are the only species of spiders that hide their webs. They weave them in unopened palmetto leaves, making them almost impossible to spot. Their primary source of food are scarab beetles, which are much larger and stronger. The outlying stands of the web trap them, and when they struggle to pull free, they end up snared in the denser tangle of threads below, trapping them in the web for the red widow to eat slowly over time.”

  Diego’s nose wrinkled in revulsion, but Isabella smiled.

  “I’m glad you killed them, Abuela. I would have killed them too,” she insisted. “They deserved it.”

  Luna ran her hand through her granddaughter’s long, dark hair. “Yes, they did.”

  “La Viuda Roja,” Isabella repeated. “I hope I have a name like that someday.”

  “But Abuela…” Diego started.

  “Yes, muchacho?”

  The boy’s expression grew pained again. “I don’t understand.”

  Isabella smirked, understanding all too well. Luna Diaz Delgado loved all her grandchildren equally, but Isabella, all ten years of her, was the apple of her eye, the first blood relative she believed capable of inheriting the family empire she had first maintained and then expanded, after the murder of her husband many years before.

  “What was Abuelo like?” Isabella asked, as if reading her mind.

  “My husband, your abuelo, was a very strong man whose lone weakness was he’d never give in to anyone.”

  “Why is that weak, Abuela?” Diego asked.

  “Because true strength means keeping up appearances, letting people believe they own the upper hand, which fills them with a false sense of power. They aren’t moved to action, because in their minds it is beneath them and their interests to do so. Abuelo did not believe in appearances and, as a result, the enemies he once thought were his friends killed him in this very plaza, where he’d come to meet them for a standard negotiation.”

  “I would have beaten them up,” said Diego.

  “I would have killed them, too,” said Isabella, smiling tightly.

  Luna couldn’t help but smile. Yes, this little girl was the real thing, a spitting image of her grandmother in all the ways you couldn’t see as well as the ways you could.

  “Like Aunt Nola,” Isabella added.

  The smile slipped from Luna’s face at the reference to the youngest of her four children. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because she told me.”

  “Told you what?”

  “That she kills people. It was when we were staying at your house and I was scared because I had a bad dream. Aunt Nola came into our room and told me I shouldn’t be scared because if anyone tried to hurt me, she’d kill them, like she’s killed lots of people. That’s what she said.”

  “I don’t remember,” Diego interjected. “I was asleep.”

  “I never felt scared again after that,” Isabella added.

  Her resemblance to Nola was striking. And the truth was, Nola served Luna Diaz Delgado with her skills, just as Isabella would with hers, one day in the future.

  “Your aunt Nola is very strong,” Luna said, leaving it there.

  “As strong as you, Abuela?” Isabella asked her, lovingly.

  “Yes,” Luna replied to her granddaughter, stroking her hair again, “but not as strong as you’re going to be, mi amor.”

  “I’m tired,” whined Diego. “Can we stop now?”

  “Almost,” she said, smoothing Isabella’s hair. “There’s one more thing we need to do first.”

  16

  MEXICO CITY, MEXICO

  The Zócalo has been a gathering place for Mexicans all the way back to the Aztecs, serving as the prime location for major public ceremonies and military performances, anything with great pomp and circumstance. The plaza was enclosed by buildings on three sides and bracketed by towering flagpoles showcasing the Mexican flag billowing in the breeze.

  Luna had watched many a swearing-in, issuance of a royal proclamation, military parade, and Holy Week ceremony from the rooftop Portal de Mercaderes restaurant looking east to the entire complex known as the Palacio Nacional. As a young girl, Luna recalled the Zócalo being little more than a decaying concrete block dotted with light poles and train tracks and a single flagpole rising from the center.

  “I want to stop,” Diego wheezed, grinding his sneakers into the pavement and stamping at it with his feet. “I want to go home.”

  “Soon,” Luna said, doing her best to comfort him, while not letting the boy see the displeasure roosting in her eyes. “We’re almost there.”

  They walked on, off the Zócalo. Down one side street and then another to an empty fountain with a statue of the Holy Mother in its center, set before a church that had been shuttered since Luna had bought the property. She had stationed plenty of men in the area to dissuade others from approaching today and, true to her instructions, none of them was in view.

  The Holy Mother statue, and fountain itself, had been carved by a famed Mexican sculptor. Isabella stuck her hand forward, as if imagining she might catch some of the cool spray, and Luna watched a suddenly reanimated Diego mimic his sister’s motion.

  “What happened to the water, Abuela?” he asked her.

  “I had it drained,” she told her grandchildren. “This is an ugly pl
ace. There is no place for beauty here. Believe me, muchachos. Religion is meant for the weak. Your abuelo believed in God, never took a week off from church in his life, and look where that got him. I wish you had gotten the chance to know him. He would have loved you very much.”

  “He looks scary in his pictures,” Diego noted.

  “He was scary, all times except when he was around his family. And if he looked scary in the family pictures, it was because even then he was thinking of how to keep us all safe from his enemies, some of which he knew and some of which he didn’t. He believed keeping his family safe was the best way he could serve the God to whom he believed he owed everything, all of his wealth and power. But where was that God when he was betrayed? Where was God when those who deceived and destroyed him deserved divine punishment? Where God had failed Abuelo, I succeeded.”

  “I’m hungry,” whined Diego.

  “You’re always hungry,” snickered Isabella.

  “That is my life’s mission,” Luna told them both. “I will avenge your abuelo by making sure no others follow the false path their faith leads them down. I will show the world they are the victims of a sham perpetrated by those who need them to be weak and ineffectual. For the second time, fate has delivered the means to do this, to expose these purported men of faith for the charlatans they are. Soon it will be in my possession and the world will be forever changed.”

  “The ship!” Isabella beamed, recalling another part of her grandmother’s story. “The ship with all the dead people you told us about. What you need was on board that!”

  Luna nodded, impressed by her granddaughter’s assumption. “Very good, muchacha. Your abuelo would be alive today if not for the sham places like this perpetuated on humanity. I want the two of you to think of that anytime you find yourself straying down that same path. Do you understand?”

  Both her grandchildren nodded, even though it was clear that they didn’t. Luna did not believe in letting children remain children for long. The longer they did so, the weaker they would be as adults. She had no problem imparting the rigors of reality to them to test their mettle, to see if they might be worthy of a place at a table far different from the one where they gathered as a family at the holidays.

  Luna led her granddaughter by the hand toward the church steps, beckoning Diego to come along almost as an afterthought. She held her breath the whole way up the stairs and had to remind herself to breathe, once she’d pushed open the heavy wooden doors and stepped into the dust-ravaged church. It looked so much smaller than her memory showed her, tiny by some standards, to the point where she could not picture where all the bodies had fallen on her parents’ wedding day, when she had served as a ring bearer who never got to deliver the ring. Standing there in the weak shroud of light radiating through the entrance, she recalled a similar light pushing through this same church’s shadows just before that sound she’d taken as firecrackers began to ripple through the air.

  Luna Diaz Delgado stood inside the church for the first time since that day, the sweet smell of incense replaced by mold and wood rot. She could’ve just let it crumble, as it would in time, but she was a patient woman and had waited a long time for the right day to complete the task she’d dreamed of for many years.

  The cans of kerosene lay just where she’d ordered them left. Two of them—one for her and one for Isabella.

  “Where’s mine?” Diego asked, after she handed the second one to her granddaughter.

  “Next time,” Luna told him, turning to address Isabella. “I’m going to take this side. You take the other and just do everything you see me do, and be careful not to let any splash back upon you.”

  “Si, Abuela.”

  With that, the Red Widow twisted off the top of the can and began to pour out the kerosene, careful to soak portions of the pews as well as the floor. She glanced over at Isabella, ever so pleased to see the little girl mirroring her motions exactly. From this angle, amid the darkness barely broken by the spill of light pushing through the stained glass windows, Isabella didn’t look like a little girl at all.

  She looked like a woman.

  They drained their cans within seconds of each other, then walked hand in hand back down the aisle toward the sulking Diego.

  “Wait outside,” Luna instructed.

  “But, Abuela—”

  “Do as I say,” she ordered, no room for negotiation in her voice.

  Diego fumed and stamped out of the church, leaving Luna alone with her granddaughter. She made sure Isabella saw the box of wooden matches she removed from her pocket.

  “It would be nice if memories could be burned up as easily as wood. They can’t be, so we must satisfy ourselves with burning their source.”

  “I don’t like this place,” Isabella said, behind a deep breath.

  “The air still smells of blood, at least in my imagination, the blood of those I loved the most.” She gestured toward the suspended figure of Christ in the midst of the Crucifixion. “That will be the last to catch, meaning He will have to bear witness to the burning of His house, just as I once did.”

  La Viuda Roja, the Red Widow, handed the box of matches to her granddaughter.

  “But I want you to set the flame, my love. I want you to ignite the inferno that will consume this place people want to believe is holy. This is just the beginning, only the start.”

  Isabella slid open the box, removed a match, and ran the tip against the striker. The match flared to life.

  “The flames you are about to set will soon consume every other building like this, so that false hope can be vanquished forever, so that people can no longer be played for fools.”

  Isabella tossed the match.

  In the light of the catching flames, Luna Diaz Delgado thought she saw a tiny ring bearer wearing a white dress trudging up the aisle with a cushion clutched before her. Her father and mother staring lovingly toward her, their final smiles aimed Luna’s way.

  The surge of heat reached her before the crackle of firecrackers in memory. She took Isabella’s hand and backed toward the door, suddenly reluctant to leave this place she hated, for the last time before it fell. Outside, she closed the big doors behind her, the glow of the flames already showing in the stained glass windows.

  Diego, who’d been hopping around at the foot of the stone stairs, glimpsed the smoke starting to sift through the building.

  “Abuela,” he called out, “should we call el Departamento de Bomberos?”

  “No, muchacho,” Luna told him, unable to take her eyes from the building. “There are some fires that can’t be stopped.”

  17

  SHAVANO PARK, TEXAS

  “What’s wrong with your arm?”

  Caitlin had just poured a cup of coffee when she heard footsteps outside on the front porch. She’d picked up her coffee, only after unsnapping the safety strap over her SIG Sauer, and peered through the living room blinds into the morning sun to find Cort Wesley Masters with a take-out cup of his own. He was seated on the front porch swing, sipping at the cup in his left hand while his right splayed next to him like deadweight.

  “I can move it now,” he said, flexing the fingers stiffly.

  “You couldn’t move it before?”

  “Cramped up on me while I was leading the rescue of your friend Paz.”

  “He’s your friend too,” Caitlin said, not bothering to hide her concern. “And that was yesterday.”

  “Was it?” Cort Wesley asked, checking his watch. “I don’t even know what day it is.”

  Caitlin touched his right arm, then pressed her fingers deeper, as if to push the life back into it, until he jerked it away.

  “Do you have to do that?”

  “Did that hurt?”

  “I didn’t feel a thing.”

  “Like, nothing?”

  Cort Wesley flexed his fingers again, managing the task more easily. “See, it’s getting better.”

  Caitlin backed off. “You get it checked out?”


  “Why?”

  “Because arms are supposed to move.”

  “It’s a cramp, Ranger.”

  “You still haven’t answered my question.”

  Cort Wesley sipped some more coffee. “The team medic checked me out on the flight home.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “That it looked like a cramp.”

  “Looked like,” Caitlin repeated.

  “How about I get it checked out tomorrow and you leave me alone today?”

  “Is that a proposition, Cort Wesley?”

  He forced a smile. “As close as you’re going to get to one, if you keep badgering me.”

  Cort Wesley nodded as he sifted through the steam to take a sip. “I need to tell you something.”

  “You trying to change the subject?”

  Cort Wesley grabbed hold of Caitlin’s left wrist and squeezed. “How’s that feel?”

  “Ouch.”

  He released his grasp. “See, I’m fine.”

  “What is it you want to tell me?”

  Cort Wesley started balling his fingers into a fist, then opening them again, the motion growing smoother each time. “Down there, working that sniper rifle and watching the bodies drop like rag dolls, it felt strange and yet familiar. But I didn’t realize why until I got back. I’m in the living room, looking at that flat screen the boys play their video games on, and I realize, that’s it—gunning down those soldiers on the gallows platform didn’t feel any different than getting my butt kicked by Luke and Dylan. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

  Caitlin smiled thinly, reflectively. “I don’t think you need to be worried about Dylan and Luke becoming desensitized to violence, not after all they’ve been through.”

  Dylan had just turned twenty-two and was still thinking about returning to Brown University to complete his junior year. Seventeen-year-old Luke, about to enter his senior year at Village Prep in Houston, was currently on a European tour organized by the school. It was hard, impossible even, to imagine how far they’d come and how much they’d grown since that day she’d watched their mother get gunned down, just steps away from this very swing.